Henry Hazlitt
|birth_place = Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |death_date = July |death_place = |nationality = American |field = economics literary criticism philosophy |influences = Benjamin Anderson, Frédéric Bastiat, David Hume, William James, H.L. Mencken, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Herbert Spencer, Philip Wicksteed |opposed = John Maynard Keynes |influenced = Steve Forbes, Milton Friedman, Ron Paul, George Reisman, Murray Rothbard, Paul Samuelson, Peter Schiff, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Gene Callahan |contributions = }} Henry Stuart Hazlitt (November 28, 1894 – July 9, 1993) was an American economist, philosopher, literary critic and journalist for such publications as The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The American Mercury, Newsweek, and The New York Times, and he has been recognized as a leading interpreter of economic issues from the perspective of American conservatism and libertarianism.George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (1976) pp. 418–20. Life Henry Hazlitt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up in relative poverty, his father having died when Hazlitt was an infant. His early heroes were Herbert Spencer and William James, and his first ambition was for an academic career in psychology and philosophy. He attended New York's tuition-free City College, but left after only a short time in order to support his twice-widowed mother. ; Greaves, Bettina Bien, ; Rockwell, Llewellyn H., Hazlitt started his career at The Wall Street Journal as secretary to the managing editor when he was still a teenager, and his interest in the field of economics began while working there. His studies led him to The Common Sense of Political Economy by Philip Wicksteed which, he later said, was his first "tremendous influence" in the subject. Hazlitt published his first book, Thinking as a Science, at the age of 21. During World War I, he served in the Army Air Service in Texas, after which he returned to New York, residing at Washington Square Park for many years.Greaves, Bettina Bien, In the early 1920s, he was financial editor of '' The New York Evening Mail, and it was during this period, Hazlitt reported, that his understanding of economics was further refined by frequent discussions with former Harvard economics professor Benjamin Anderson who was then working for Chase National Bank in Manhattan. Later, when the publisher W. W. Norton suggested he write an official biography of their author Bertrand Russell, Hazlitt spent "a good deal of time," as he described it, with the famous philosopher both in New York City and London.Hazlitt, Henry, "Reflections at 70," ''Henry Hazlitt: An Appreciation, The Foundation for Economic Education, 1989, pp.6–9. Lord Russell "so admired the young journalist's talent" that he had agreed with Norton's proposal,Rockwell, Llewellyn H., but the project ended after nearly two years of work when Russell declared his intention to write his own autobiography. During the interwar decades, a vibrant period in the history of American literature, Hazlitt served as literary editor of The New York Sun (1925–1929), and as literary editor of the Left-leaning journal, The Nation (1930–1933). In connection with his work for The Nation, Hazlitt also edited A Practical Program for America (1932), a compilation of Great Depression policy considerations, but he was in the minority in calling for less government intervention in the economy. After a series of public debates with socialist Louis Fischer, Hazlitt and The Nation parted ways.Greaves, Bettina Bien, ; Rockwell, Llewellyn H., In 1933, Hazlitt published The Anatomy of Criticism, an extended "trialogue" examining the nature of literary criticism and appreciation, regarded by some to be an early refutation of literary deconstruction. In the same year, he became H. L. Mencken's chosen successor as editor of the literary magazine, The American Mercury, which Mencken had founded with George Jean Nathan. Due to increasing differences with the publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, Sr., he served in that role for only a brief time, but Mencken wrote that Hazlitt was the "only competent critic of the arts that I have heard of who was at the same time a competent economist, of practical as well as theoretical training," adding that he "is one of the few economists in human history who could really write."Rockwell, Llewellyn H., In 1929, Hazlitt married Valerie Earle, daughter of the noted photographer and Vitagraph film director William P. S. Earle. They were married by the pacifist minister, John Haynes Holmes, but later divorced. In 1936, he married Frances Kanes, the author of The Concise Bible,Hazlitt, Frances Kanes, The Concise Bible, Liberty Press, 1962. with whom he later collaborated to produce an anthology of the Stoic philosophers, The Wisdom of the Stoics: Selections from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius (1984). They were married until Frances' death in 1991. From 1934 to 1946, Hazlitt was the principal editorial writer on finance and economics for The New York Times, writing both a signed weekly column along with most of the unsigned editorials on economics, producing a considerable volume of work. Following World War II, he came into conflict with Arthur Hays Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times, over the newly established Bretton Woods system which created the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Hazlitt opposed the Bretton Woods Agreement, primarily fearing the risk of inflation. After agreeing not to write on the topic, he looked for another venue for his work, deciding on Newsweek magazine, for which he wrote a signed column, "Business Tides," from 1946 to 1966. According to Hazlitt, the greatest influence on his writing in economics was the work of Ludwig von Mises, and he is credited with introducing the ideas of the Austrian School of economics to the English-speaking layman. In 1938, for example, he reviewed the recently published English translation of Mises’s influential treatise Socialism for The New York Times, declaring it "a classic" and “the most devastating analysis of socialism yet penned." ; Greaves, Bettina Bien, After the Jewish economist's emigration to the United States from Nazi-dominated Europe in 1940, Hazlitt arranged for Mises to contribute editorials to The New York Times, and helped to secure for Mises a teaching position at New York University. Along with the efforts of his friends, Max Eastman and John Chamberlain, Hazlitt also helped introduce F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom to the American reading public. His 1944 review in The New York Times caused Reader's Digest, where Eastman served as roving editor, to publish one of its trademark condensations, bringing the future Nobel laureate's work to a vast audience.Hulsmann, Jorg Guido, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, 2007, Ludwig von Mises Institute, ISBN 978-1-933550-18-3, p. xi; Ludwig von Mises Institute, Henry Hazlitt: A Giant of Liberty, pp. 20–27; Greaves, Bettina Bien, ; Henry Hazlitt: an Appreciation, Foundation for Economic Education, 1989, pp. 8–9. Unlike many other writers of his generation from the political right, Hazlitt never experienced a period when he was a socialist or communist, or a significant change in his classical liberal political views. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Established by Leonard Read in 1946, FEE is considered to be the first "think tank" for free market ideas. He was also one of the original members of the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society in 1947.Greaves, Bettina Bien, ; Henry Hazlitt: an Appreciation, Foundation for Economic Education, 1989 With John Chamberlain (and Suzanne La Follette as managing editor), Hazlitt served as editor of the early free market publication The Freeman from 1950 to 1952, and as sole editor-in-chief from 1952 to 1953. Its contributors during his tenure there included Hayek, Mises and Wilhelm Röpke, as well as the writers James Burnham, John Dos Passos, Max Eastman, John T. Flynn, Frank Meyer, Raymond Moley, Morrie Ryskind and George Sokolsky.Chamberlain, John, A Life With the Printed Word, 1982, Regnery, p.138; Hamilton, Charles H., "The Freeman: the Early Years," The Freeman, Dec., 1984, vol. 34, iss. 12. Prior to his becoming editor, The Freeman had supported Senator Joseph McCarthy in his conflict with President Harry Truman on the issue of communism, "undiscriminatingly" according to some critics, but upon becoming editor, Hazlitt changed the magazine's policy to one of support for President Truman.Diggins, John P., Up From Communism, Columbia University Press, 1975, p.217. The Freeman is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr., which from the start included many of the same contributing editors.Chamberlain, John, A Life with the Printed Word, pp.141, 145–146. Hazlitt himself was on the masthead of National Review, either as a Contributing Editor or, later, as Contributor, from its inception in 1955 until his death in 1993. There were differences between the journals: The Freeman under Hazlitt was more secular and presented a wider range of foreign policy opinion than the later National Review. Even prior to her success with The Fountainhead, the novelist Ayn Rand was a friend of both Hazlitt and his wife, Frances, and it was Hazlitt who introduced Rand to Mises, bringing together the two figures who would become most associated with the defense of pure laissez-faire capitalism.Burns, Jennifer, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, 2009, Oxford University Press, pp. 141–143; cf. Branden, Barbara, The Passion of Ayn Rand, Doubleday, 1986, pp.168–169, 181n. The two became admirers of Hazlitt and of one another.See, e.g., the first issue of Rand's Objectivist Newsletter which declared Mises "the most distinguished economist of our age" and "an intransigent advocate of freedom and capitalism" (The Objectivist Newsletter, "Review: Planned Chaos by Ludwig von Mises," vol. 1, no. 1, Jan., 1962), and the second issue which declared Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson to be "a classic in the literature of freedom" and "the finest primer available for students of capitalism" (The Objectivist Newsletter, "Review: Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt," vol. 1, no. 2, Feb., 1962); Mises invited Rand to attend his seminar as an "honored guest" (Burns, Goddess of the Market, p.177) and praised her novel Atlas Shrugged as "a pitiless unmasking of the insincerity of the policies adopted by governments and political parties" and "a cogent analysis of the evils that plague our society" in a letter to Rand (dated Jan. 23, 1958, quoted in Hülsmann, Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, p. 996.); and see, McConnell, Scott, 100 Voices: an Oral History of Ayn Rand, "Sylvester Petro," New American Library, 2010, pp.165–170. Hazlitt became well known both through his articles and by frequently debating prominent politicians on the radio, including: Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and U.S. Senators Paul Douglas and Hubert H. Humphrey, the future Vice President. In the early 1950s, he also occasionally appeared on the New York television current events program Longines Chronoscope, interviewing figures such as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Congressman Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., along with coeditor William Bradford Huie.Longines Chronoscope programs are at the Library of Congress's National Archives and Records cataloged as "Television Interviews, 1951–1955"; Longines Chronoscope (TV Series 1951–1955) – IMDb At the invitation of philosopher Sidney Hook, he was also a participating member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom in the 1950s.Hook, Sidney, Out of Step, Carroll & Graf, 1987, chapter 26. When he finally left Newsweek in 1966, the magazine replaced Hazlitt with three university professors: "free-market monetarist Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, middle-of-the-roader Henry Wallich of Yale, and Keynesian Paul A. Samuelson of M.I.T." His last published scholarly article appeared in the first volume of The Review of Austrian Economics (now, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics) in 1987. Hazlitt died at the age of 98. and Wikimedia Commons.]] Writing "The times call for courage. The times call for hard work. But if the demands are high, it is because the stakes are even higher. They are nothing less than the future of liberty, which means the future of civilization." ''Economics in One Lesson (1946) has been called Hazlitt's "most enduring contribution," with a million copies sold and available in ten languages, ; it is considered an "enduring classic" in conservative, free market and libertarian circles. Ayn Rand called it a "magnificent job of theoretical exposition," while Congressman Ron Paul ranks it with the works of Frédéric Bastiat and F. A. Hayek. Hayek himself praised the work, as did fellow Nobel Prize laureate Milton Friedman, who said that Hazlitt's description of the price system, for example, was "a true classic: timeless, correct, painlessly instructive." In his book Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell also compliments Hazlitt, and Sowell's work has been cited as "following" in the "Bastiat-Hazlitt tradition" of economic exposition.Ebeling, Richard M., "Book Review: Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell," Freedom Daily, April 2001, and ; Sowell, Thomas, Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy, revised and expanded ed. Basic Books, (1st ed. 2000) ISBN 978-0-465-08145-5, see, e.g., pp.425–426, note on Chapter 18. In 1996, Laissez Faire Books issued a 50th anniversary edition with an introduction by publisher and presidential candidate Steve Forbes. Another of his enduring works is The Failure of the New Economics (1959), a detailed, chapter-by-chapter critique of John Maynard Keynes's highly influential General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, about which he paraphrased a quote attributed to Samuel Johnson, that he was "unable to find in it a single doctrine that is both true and original. What is original in the book is not true; and what is true is not original." Hazlitt also published three books on the subject of inflation, including From Bretton Woods to World Inflation (1984), and two influential works on poverty, Man vs. The Welfare State (1969), and The Conquest of Poverty (1973), thought by some to have anticipated the later work of Charles Murray in Losing Ground.Rockwell, Llewellyn H., ; Murray, Charles, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, Basic Books, 1984, ISBN 978-0-465-04231-9. His major work in philosophy is The Foundations of Morality (1964), a treatise on ethics defending utilitarianism, which builds on the work of David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Hazlitt's 1922 work, The Way to Will-Power has been described as a defense of free will or "individual initiative against the deterministic claims of Freudian psychoanalysis." In contrast to many other thinkers on the political right, he was an agnostic with regard to religious beliefs.Hazlitt, Henry, "Agnosticism and Morality," The New Individualist Review, Spring, 1966. In A New Constitution Now (1942), published during Franklin D. Roosevelt's unprecedented third term as President of the United States, Hazlitt called for the replacement of the existing fixed-term presidential tenure in the United States with a more Anglo-European system of "cabinet" government, under which a head of state who had lost the confidence of the legislature or cabinet might be removed from office after a no-confidence vote in as little as 30 days. (Shortly following FDR's death, presidential term limits were enacted.) His 1951 novel, The Great Idea (reissued in 1966 as Time Will Run Back) depicts rulers of a centrally-planned socialist dystopia discovering, amid the resulting economic chaos, the need to restore market pricing system, private ownership of capital goods and competitive markets. Hazlitt was a prolific writer, authoring 25 works in his lifetime. Recognition He was awarded an Honorary Doctoral Degree at Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan in his speech before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), named Hazlitt as one of the "intellectual leaders" (along with Hayek, Mises, Friedman, Russell Kirk, James Burnham and Frank Meyer) who had "shaped so much of our thoughts..." Ludwig von Mises said at a dinner honoring Hazlitt: "In this age of the great struggle in favor of freedom and the social system in which men can live as free men, you are our leader. You have indefatigably fought against the step-by-step advance of the powers anxious to destroy everything that human civilization has created over a long period of centuries... You are the economic conscience of our country and of our nation." The Henry Hazlitt Foundation From 1997 to 2002 there was an organization called The Henry Hazlitt Foundation which actively promoted libertarian networking online, especially through its website Free-Market.Net. This organization was named in honor of Hazlitt because he was known for introducing a wide range of people to libertarian ideas through his writing and for helping free-market advocates connect with each other. It is important to note that the foundation was started after Hazlitt's passing and had no official connection with his estate. Publications * Thinking as a Science, 1916 * The Way to Will-Power, 1922 * A Practical Program for America, 1932 * The Anatomy of Criticism, 1933 * Instead of Dictatorship, 1933 * A New Constitution Now, 1942 * Freedom in America: The Freeman (with Virgil Jordan), 1945 * The Full Employment Bill: An Analysis, 1945 * Economics in One Lesson, 1946 * (Introduction by Walter Block) * Will Dollars Save the World?, 1947 * Forum: Do Current Events Indicate Greater Government Regulation, Nationalization, or Socialization?, Proceedings from a Conference Sponsored by The Economic and Business Foundation, 1948 * The Illusions of Point Four, 1950 * The Great Idea, 1951 (titled Time Will Run Back in Great Britain, revised and rereleased with this title in 1966.) * The Free Man's Library, 1956 * The Failure of the 'New Economics': An Analysis of the Keynesian Fallacies, 1959 * The Critics of Keynesian Economics (ed.), 1960 * What You Should Know About Inflation, 1960 * The Foundations of Morality, 1964 * Man vs. The Welfare State, 1969 * The Conquest of Poverty, 1973 * To Stop Inflation, Return to Gold, 1974 * * From Bretton Woods to World Inflation, 1984 * The Wisdom of the Stoics: Selections from Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, with Frances Hazlitt, 1984 * The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, 1993 * [http://www.archive.org/details/ispoliticsinsolu00henrguat Is Politics Insoluble?], 1997 * [http://www.archive.org/details/rulesforlivinget00henrguat Rules for Living: The Ethics of Social Cooperation], 1999 (an abridgment by Bettina Bien Greaves of Hazlitt's The Foundations of Morality.) See also * * * Classical liberalism * Laissez Faire * Libertarianism * Mont Pelerin Society * Utilitarianism References Articles * Henry Hazlitt: A Giant of Liberty, Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994. ISBN 978-0-945466-16-1. * Henry Hazlitt: an Appreciation, Foundation for Economic Education, 1989, pp. 8–9. * Interview with Henry Hazlitt * "Henry Hazlitt: The People's Austrian" in Randall Holcombe, edit., The Great Austrian Economists (2009; originally published as 15 Great Austrian Economists, 1999), pp. 167–179. * Richard M. Ebeling and Roy A. Childs, Jr., "Henry Hazlitt: An Appreciation," Laissez Faire Books, November 1985. * Bettina Bien Greaves, "Henry Hazlitt: A Man for Many Seasons," The Freeman, November, 1989. * Henry Hazlitt, "The Early History of FEE," The Freeman, March 1984 (article is excerpted from his remarks at the Leonard E. Read Memorial Conference on Freedom, November 18, 1983.) * Llewellyn H. Rockwell, "Henry Hazlitt: Journalist of the Century," The Freeman, May, 1995. * Murray N. Rothbard, "Henry Hazlitt Celebrates 80th Birthday," Human Events, November 20, 1974, reprinted in The Libertarian Forum, December 1974. * George Selgin, Don Boudreaux, and Sanford Ikeda:, "An Interview with Henry Hazlitt", Austrian Economics Newsletter, Spring, 1984. * "Reason Interview: Henry Hazlitt", Reason, December, 1984 * Hans F. Sennholz, edit., The Wisdom of Henry Hazlitt, Foundation for Economic Education, 1993) See Bibliography of Henry Hazlitt for complete list. External links * * En lärdom (första kapitlet i Economics in One Lesson, på Svenska) av Henry Hazlitt * Honorary Doctoral Degrees at University Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala * Henry Hazlitt Quotations * Category:1894 births Category:1993 deaths Category:American economics writers Category:American libertarians Category:Austrian School economists Category:Conservatism in the United States Category:Libertarian economists Category:Libertarian theorists Category:Mont Pelerin Society members Category:Utilitarians